It started life as a fictional case-study to be given to his geography students on the real-world implications of a one-resource economy in an inhospitable wasteland inhabited by violent religious fundamentalists the 'colonial powers' had a hand in creating. Where the entire world comes crashing down if anything were to happen to that one resource.
Over time it grew into basically Lord of the Rings but for Sci Fi.
In Dune it's a drug that everyone needs for various reasons, be it life-extension or intelligence enhancing or seeing the future, or giving a coven of witch-sex-slave-concubines ancestral memories, or the fact that the entire interstellar transportation system runs off it.
It takes place like incomprehensibly far in the future, post cyborg enslavement and near extinction and human rebellion and eventual religious-style outlawing of computers as a concept. So everything is high-tech mechanical or clockwork, and we drug up or otherwise breed entire human beings to serve singular functions.
Political climate receded back to basically feudalism but on planets. Most plots are multi-generational, the central plot focuses on like a 30000 generation breeding program.
It also taught me the meaning of the word Jihad and most other middle-eastern bullshit I know.
My favorite thing about Dune is the Butlerian Jihad thing. It's never described in detail, it seems like a mere plot device to limit technology and make Spice necessary for interstellar travel, and it obviously immediately evokes the bog standard human rebellion against robots, terminator-style. Here are all the quotes I found by searching for "butlerian" in my Dune e-books that shed some light beyond that:
The assumption that a whole system can be made to work better through an assault on its conscious elements betrays a dangerous ignorance. This has often been the ignorant approach of those who call themselves scientists and technologists.
—THE BUTLERIAN JIHAD BY HARQ AL-ADA
“The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines,” Leto said. “Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”
Then came the Butlerian Jihad -- two generations of chaos. The god of machine-logic was overthrown among the masses and a new concept was raised:
"Man may not be replaced."
Those two generations of violence were a thalamic pause for all humankind. Men looked at their gods and their rituals and saw that both were filled with that most terrible of all equations: fear over ambition.
A type of religious civil servant had sprung up all through his universe. This new man of the Qizarate was more often a convert. He seldom displaced a Freman in the key posts, but he was filling all the interstices. He used melange as much to show he could afford it as for the geriatric benefits. He stood apart from his rulers -- Emperor, Guild, Bene Gesserit, Landsraad, Family or Qizarate. His gods were Routine and Records. He was served by mentats and prodigious filing systems. Expediency was the first word in his catechism, although he gave proper lip-service to the precepts of the Butlerians. Machines could not be fashioned in the image of a man's mind, he said, but he betrayed by every action that he preferred machines to men, statistics to individuals, the faraway general view to the intimate personal touch requiring imagination and initiative.
The Reverend Mother closed her eyes to hide his face. Damnation! To cast the genetic dice in such a way! Loathing boiled in her breast. The teaching of the Bene Gesserit, the lessons of the Butlerian Jihad -- all proscribed such an act. One did not demean the highest aspirations of humankind. No machine could function in the way of a human mind. No word or deed could imply that men might be bred on the level of animals.
That's all of them in the original first four books, though I might have missed some, corrections are welcome.
This paints a very different picture: the enslaving machine was not a Skynet sending terminators with guns, it was an algorithm that suggested the best profession for you, for example, and an algorithm that suggested what you should buy and what books you should read to maximize happiness and minimize the fearful disappointment. And, of course, those algorithms subtly restructured everyone's lives in a way that emphasized the things the algorithms could work with, to their own inscrutable and utterly unhuman ends (such as "maximizing engagement" in case of Facebook) and made everything that couldn't be stored in a database entirely inconsequential.
This is very relevant these days, and it was fucking prophetic in 1965.
If you have read them they are impossible to adapt to the big-screen the universe is too large and detailed. It would be like trying to adapt Asimov's Foundation Series to the Big Screen.
Much of Dune is dialog and people contemplating in their mind. All of the technology has to be reimagined because there are no computers even though it's a high tech sci-fi universe.
I'd love to see later foundation books get adapted. Half of foundation and earth is just flying around in a ship then getting an m night shyamalan twist where a character never mentioned in the main foundation books was behind it all
42 comments
1 SnapshillBot 2018-10-30
Your condescending, contradictory bullshit isn't attractive to anyone except your frothing, basement-dwelling, virgin army.
Snapshots:
I am a bot. (Info / Contact)
1 AnnoysTheGoys 2018-10-30
https://i.imgur.com/HRx4qhI.gif
1 Killer_B_Cell 2018-10-30
Nice
1 dratamard2 2018-10-30
space capeshit 🤮🤮🤮
1 RyuunDragon 2018-10-30
This is like the first thing I've ever disagreed with you on
1 Chauncy_Prime 2018-10-30
Dune is one of the best sci-fi series ever written. If you ever read them you will see why they are impossible to adapt to the big-screen.
David Lynch directed the first movie and hated it so much because of budget and studio constraints he took his name off the film.
1 Momruepari 2018-10-30
It's been over for bookcels
1 loli_esports 2018-10-30
Thanks Brian Anderson
1 ArtisanalCollabo 2018-10-30
If Jodor directed Dune it would have been both his first film with an actual plot and his first film not projecting his pedophilia
1 I3P 2018-10-30
You're forgetting the Baron and his slave boys. Move was probably canned because he kept insisting on including that as a sex scene
1 Kochroach 2018-10-30
From now on I'm going to pass this off as fact.
1 -Kite-Man- 2018-10-30
It started life as a fictional case-study to be given to his geography students on the real-world implications of a one-resource economy in an inhospitable wasteland inhabited by violent religious fundamentalists the 'colonial powers' had a hand in creating. Where the entire world comes crashing down if anything were to happen to that one resource.
Over time it grew into basically Lord of the Rings but for Sci Fi.
In Dune it's a drug that everyone needs for various reasons, be it life-extension or intelligence enhancing or seeing the future, or giving a coven of witch-sex-slave-concubines ancestral memories, or the fact that the entire interstellar transportation system runs off it.
It takes place like incomprehensibly far in the future, post cyborg enslavement and near extinction and human rebellion and eventual religious-style outlawing of computers as a concept. So everything is high-tech mechanical or clockwork, and we drug up or otherwise breed entire human beings to serve singular functions.
Political climate receded back to basically feudalism but on planets. Most plots are multi-generational, the central plot focuses on like a 30000 generation breeding program.
It also taught me the meaning of the word Jihad and most other middle-eastern bullshit I know.
1 LongPostBot 2018-10-30
Have you owned the libs yet?
I am a bot. Contact for questions
1 -Kite-Man- 2018-10-30
Someone get the box and the gom jabbor, we got to do a humanity test.
1 Momruepari 2018-10-30
*yawn
1 -Kite-Man- 2018-10-30
Start at Clifford and work up.
1 Momruepari 2018-10-30
No! I get scared of the pictures
1 Kochroach 2018-10-30
The sequels are shit though.
1 zergling_Lester 2018-10-30
My favorite thing about Dune is the Butlerian Jihad thing. It's never described in detail, it seems like a mere plot device to limit technology and make Spice necessary for interstellar travel, and it obviously immediately evokes the bog standard human rebellion against robots, terminator-style. Here are all the quotes I found by searching for "butlerian" in my Dune e-books that shed some light beyond that:
The assumption that a whole system can be made to work better through an assault on its conscious elements betrays a dangerous ignorance. This has often been the ignorant approach of those who call themselves scientists and technologists.
—THE BUTLERIAN JIHAD BY HARQ AL-ADA
“The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines,” Leto said. “Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”
Then came the Butlerian Jihad -- two generations of chaos. The god of machine-logic was overthrown among the masses and a new concept was raised:
"Man may not be replaced."
Those two generations of violence were a thalamic pause for all humankind. Men looked at their gods and their rituals and saw that both were filled with that most terrible of all equations: fear over ambition.
A type of religious civil servant had sprung up all through his universe. This new man of the Qizarate was more often a convert. He seldom displaced a Freman in the key posts, but he was filling all the interstices. He used melange as much to show he could afford it as for the geriatric benefits. He stood apart from his rulers -- Emperor, Guild, Bene Gesserit, Landsraad, Family or Qizarate. His gods were Routine and Records. He was served by mentats and prodigious filing systems. Expediency was the first word in his catechism, although he gave proper lip-service to the precepts of the Butlerians. Machines could not be fashioned in the image of a man's mind, he said, but he betrayed by every action that he preferred machines to men, statistics to individuals, the faraway general view to the intimate personal touch requiring imagination and initiative.
The Reverend Mother closed her eyes to hide his face. Damnation! To cast the genetic dice in such a way! Loathing boiled in her breast. The teaching of the Bene Gesserit, the lessons of the Butlerian Jihad -- all proscribed such an act. One did not demean the highest aspirations of humankind. No machine could function in the way of a human mind. No word or deed could imply that men might be bred on the level of animals.
That's all of them in the original first four books, though I might have missed some, corrections are welcome.
This paints a very different picture: the enslaving machine was not a Skynet sending terminators with guns, it was an algorithm that suggested the best profession for you, for example, and an algorithm that suggested what you should buy and what books you should read to maximize happiness and minimize the fearful disappointment. And, of course, those algorithms subtly restructured everyone's lives in a way that emphasized the things the algorithms could work with, to their own inscrutable and utterly unhuman ends (such as "maximizing engagement" in case of Facebook) and made everything that couldn't be stored in a database entirely inconsequential.
This is very relevant these days, and it was fucking prophetic in 1965.
/u/Imperial_Sardaukar check this out btw.
1 Killer_B_Cell 2018-10-30
I wanna fuck your mom.
1 dratamard2 2018-10-30
🤗🤗🤗
1 loli_esports 2018-10-30
Tfw no dune nerd milf gf
1 Redactor0 2018-10-30
Tell me about it. Nobody will be my Lady Jessica.
1 SeattleFingers 2018-10-30
We wuz spice n shiet
1 Chukril 2018-10-30
MFW the matriarchy spends a millennia on an inbreeding program to gain prescience but still need rely on some dude.
1 cmakk1012 2018-10-30
lmao @ dunelets who never even got a good film adaptation 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
1 Killer_B_Cell 2018-10-30
There’s a new one in the works as we speak, and the tv miniseries wasn’t terrible if you’re really fanboying.
1 -Kite-Man- 2018-10-30
CoD was lightyears ahead of Dune when it came to those minis.
Plus we got James McAvoy out of it. That's enough for me.
1 Redactor0 2018-10-30
I don't think it'll ever happen. Way too much of the story happens inside people's heads.
1 Chauncy_Prime 2018-10-30
This exactly.
1 aqouta 2018-10-30
That's what I thought about the magicians series, they'll just take artistic liberties.
1 Chauncy_Prime 2018-10-30
If you have read them they are impossible to adapt to the big-screen the universe is too large and detailed. It would be like trying to adapt Asimov's Foundation Series to the Big Screen.
Much of Dune is dialog and people contemplating in their mind. All of the technology has to be reimagined because there are no computers even though it's a high tech sci-fi universe.
1 loli_esports 2018-10-30
I'd love to see later foundation books get adapted. Half of foundation and earth is just flying around in a ship then getting an m night shyamalan twist where a character never mentioned in the main foundation books was behind it all
1 Chicup 2018-10-30
I think you could do the foundation easier than dune. The problem would be the books are not action books so you know they would dumb that part up.
1 Vonchor 2018-10-30
Btw apple is adapting it https://www.imdb.com/news/ni62182944
1 BumwineBaudelaire 2018-10-30
the lynch one is a baroque masterpiece
1 Chicup 2018-10-30
To do dune properly it would take like 4 full movies, maybe 5, and still wouldn't make sense to 80% of the public.
1 Chauncy_Prime 2018-10-30
That's not Shai-Hulud. That's a representation of Leto II The God Emperor. He's not that big though.
1 jaredschaffer27 2018-10-30
Preserve life through loathing, awaken hope within hatred, wrest insight from outrage, this is our birthright and obligation
1 loli_esports 2018-10-30
replace duncan idaho with another duncan idaho
1 Momruepari 2018-10-30
nerd spaceshit
1 Chicup 2018-10-30
The Kwisatz Haderach was a mayo.
Get over it.